They say that politics abhors a vacuum, and the byelection in the Quebec riding of Chicoutimi—Le Fjord reminds us of that.

To be sure, the Conservatives won primarily because they had a strong candidate in former Chicoutimi Junior A hockey coach Richard Martel.

But he didn’t bring in the Conservative vote at 53 per cent, up from 16.6 per cent in the 2015 election, all by himself.

There was also the vacuum created by the collapse of the NDP from 29.7 per cent in 2015, to 8.7 last Monday, as well as the cratering of the Bloc Québéois vote from 20 per cent to just 5.6 per cent in the byelection. As for the Liberals, they came just below their 2015 winning score of 31 per cent with 29 per cent last week.

The NDP was led in 2015 by a Quebecer, Tom Mulcair, who came within a point of holding the Chicoutimi—Le Fjord seat won by le bon jack, Jack Layton, in their 59-seat sweep of Quebec in 2011. The new NDP leader, Jagmeet Singh, speaks excellent French, but many francophone Quebecers see a Sikh with a turban and apparently can’t see their way past that. Singh needs to spend time on the ground in Quebec, proposing a narrative of tolerance and diversity, if the NDP is to retain its 16 Quebec seats in the 2019 election.

As for the Bloc, it is a party in complete disarray, since the arrival last year of hardline separatist Martine Ouellet as its leader. Seven of its 10 members quit the Bloc caucus this spring before she was finally deposed this month in a leadership review which saw her receive only 32 per cent support by Bloc members. (She never even bothered to seek a seat in a byelection, retaining her own as an independent member of the Quebec National Assembly, to which she was first elected as a member of the Parti Québécois in a 2010 byelection).

Well, there are two character traits of Bloc voters, in terms of the abhorrent political vacuum.

First, many Bloc voters of a certain age would never vote Liberal, let alone for anyone named Trudeau. They have memories of Justin Trudeau’s father, going back to the unilateral patriation of the Constitution over the objections of Quebec in 1981, as well as his role in killing the Meech Lake Accord and Quebec’s Distinct Society clause in 1990.

Second, most Bloc voters are soft nationalists rather than separatists. These were francophone Quebecers who voted for Brian Mulroney in 1984 and 1988.

The current Conservative leader, Andrew Scheer, evidently senses the opportunity of re-creating the Mulroney coalition in Quebec.

For the Saguenay byelection, the Conservatives not only recruited a candidate with his own personal brand, Scheer was smart enough to stand in former coach Martel’s shadow on the campaign trail (the picture of them chowing down on poutine together was the defining image of the campaign).

But Scheer also solicited and received the support of former Bloc leader Michel Gauthier, a one-time MP for the Saguenay region, and that was a significant third-party endorsement last month.
And then, on broader issues, Scheer has been working the political sensibilities of francophone Quebecers.

During the byelection campaign, he pointedly visited the legal and irregular border crossing points at Lacolle, where thousands of asylum claimants have been streaming in from upstate New York. He pointedly called on the Liberals to get their act together, which wouldn’t have passed unnoticed in the Chicoutimi—Le Fjord campaign.

Looking forward, it’s also worth noting that Scheer went to Quebec City on Monday and endorsed the idea of Quebecers filing a single tax return to the province, rather than one to Quebec and one to Ottawa, with Quebec remitting the federal share to the feds, as Ottawa does in collecting taxes on behalf of the other nine provinces.

For reasons best known to himself, Justin Trudeau has already rejected this idea after it was unanimously proposed by a motion of the Quebec legislature. For Quebecers, who must file two returns every April, this is an obvious vote-getter.

Scheer remains a largely unknown quantity in Quebec, but he stands to benefit from low expectations, as he did in his spring appearance on Tout le monde en parle, the Sunday night Radio-Canada talk show with as many as 1.5 million viewers, where he admitted to occasionally smoking pot as a teenager, but asked people not to tell his father about it.

His French remains a work in progress, for his accent more than his grammar, but he’s improving.
And so what is emerging from the Saguenay byelection and these other events is a certain brand differentiation.

The Liberals retain a huge advantage in Trudeau as a favourite son of Quebec. And yet, in a byelection in the heart of Canada’s aluminum industry, he gained no support for his standing up to Donald Trump on his tariffs against Canadian steel and aluminum. While Trudeau’s approval numbers jumped by more than 10 points nationwide in the wake of his dust-up with Trump at the G7 summit in Charlevoix, it got him no votes in the byelection, which the Conservatives won by 24 points.

Looking ahead to October 2019, Quebec may not be landslide territory for the Liberals, after all, which is to say no 60-70 of Quebec’s 78 seats for les rouges.

The Liberals have been counting on gains from their 40 Quebec seats in 2015 to offset expected losses in the lower mainland of British Columbia because of the Trans Mountain pipeline, as well as in vote-rich suburban Ontario around Toronto and the Atlantic, where they now hold all 32 seats. All of which could bring a minority Liberal government into play or perhaps, depending on Quebec and suburban Toronto, even a Conservative one.

Welcome to great conversations on the summer political barbecue circuit.

The views, opinions and positions expressed by all iPolitics columnists and contributors are the author’s alone. They do not inherently or expressly reflect the views, opinions and/or positions of iPolitics.

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L. Ian MacDonald is editor of Policy, the bi-monthly magazine of Canadian politics and public policy. He is the author of six books. He served as chief speechwriter to Prime Minister Brian Mulroney from 1985-88, and later as head of the public affairs division of the Canadian Embassy in Washington from 1992-94.